We’ve all been there – looking at the labels on the supermarket shelves and trying to make sense of the sustainability claims that are being made and the information we’re being given to back them up. The sustainability of our purchases is now front of mind with most of us and we all want to know how our food is being produced and what measures the producers and suppliers are taking to improve its sustainability – environmental, social and economic.
Some sectors have made greater progress on sustainability standards than others – think coffee, cocoa and palm oil. In other sectors, while they’re moving in the right direction and actions are being taken, there’s still a lack of agreement and alignment on their standards. Dairy products sit in one of these areas.
Dairy is feeling the heat right now. The narrative is – variously – that biogenic methane from cows is the root cause of all our climate change problems, that fertiliser and slurry usage are destroying our waterways, that expansion of agricultural land is impacting our biodiversity and that the farmers who produce milk are not taking the necessary steps to mitigate their impact on the environment.
With this as a background, dairy sustainability standards – of which there are a significant number– will need to be ever-more rigorous, transparent and aligned if they are to be effective and not simply dismissed by the increasingly sustainability-aware consumer as disingenuous greenwashing.
Which is easy to say – but where do we begin the journey of assessing the standards as they are, looking at what they comprise and beginning to suggest how improvements might be made? It’s exactly the task that researchers funded by VistaMilk, in conjunction with Wageningen University in the Netherlands, are undertaking, with the goal of providing better understanding of dairy sector standards and their potential improvement.
Keeley McGarr-O’Brien is a Walsh Scholar at Teagasc and it’s her work that’s addressing this important topic. Keeley has enormous experience in dairying, having been a farmer and cheesemaker in the United States, before pursuing an academic path with a masters in agroforestry and food security. The sustainability aspect of the dairy industry has always been of great interest to her and was a natural choice of subject for her PhD thesis.
The work began by developing criteria to define a ‘sustainability certification standard’ looking at the sustainability studies that are already out there, the various elements that comprise them (environmental, social and economic), their sustainability areas of focus and the way they balance sustainability ‘trade-offs’.
For example, the more scientifically rigorous a standard is – which gives it credibility – the less accessible it may be for dairy producers, in terms of meeting the standard’s requirements. In addition, as the standards have specific requirements, defined when the standard was created, continuous improvement (taking into account developing sustainability metrics) is difficult to achieve.
The research identified 19 dairy sustainability standards with – perhaps unsurprisingly – a wide variation between them both in terms of the organisations involved, and in the number of criteria they require dairy producers (farmers) to meet – which ranged from 18 to 436.
A list of 44 sustainability challenges was drawn up to help determine what was covered by each standard, showing an average of 12 (with a range from six to 20). All the standards encompassed animal welfare as well as some environmental challenges, however the social and economic elements were not commonly covered. As a result, for the consumer, it would be difficult to get to the bottom of what’s covered by each one.
This research was the first of its kind to look at the overall picture of today’s market-based dairy sustainability standards. Clearly, the analysis could be used by sustainability standard organisers to help create a ‘standard of standards’ helping define sustainability and how specific standards are formulated.
It could also inform a general understanding of the demands and opportunities for dairy producers who participate, the very necessary work on the trade-offs and the potential improvement and gradual alignment of dairy sustainability standards.
For further information, contact Keeley McGarr-O’Brien keeley.mcgarrobrien@teagasc.ie